Farscape: Cultures: Nebari

To an outside observer, the Nebari seem to be a peaceful, law-abiding bunch of people, but there’s a little more to it than that.  From their first introduction in Durka Returns, it’s been clear they’re not the species you should mess around with.  The reason that they have such a seemingly perfect society is that they use a process called Mind Cleansing to erase even the possibility of ‘criminal’ thoughts from the mind of anyone they think shows any signs of being non-conformist, whether they are Nebari or not.

This is an incredibly long process, which takes 100 cycles (roughly 100 years), and is supposedly irreversible.  This however, isn’t always the case, as shown in Durka Returns – Durka is Rygel’s greatest enemy, and tortured him when he was first captured by the Peacekeepers, but Durka’s hatred of Rygel broke the Nebari Mind Cleansing.

The Nebari also have a temporary method of mind cleansing, used on Moya’s crew in A Clockwork Nebari, which involves needles in eyes and other icky stuff they didn’t go into.  This can be broken easily, as it is only intended to keep someone under control until they can lock them up for 100 cycles and subdue them permanently.

Chiana, the only member of the crew who hasn’t been there from the start, is Nebari, and was being transported to undergo the Mind Cleansing, when they came across Moya.  Collars are used on Nebari prisoners, like Chiana, which enable their captors to inflict incredible pain on them if they are disobedient.

The Nebari apparently have firepower far exceeding that of the Peacekeepers – it was a Nebari ship that destroyed the Zelbinion – a legendary Peacekeeper command carrier that disappeared about 100 cycles before the crew arrived in the Unchartered Territories, and Moya finds deserted and in ruins in PK Tech Girl.

The crew is shocked to find that it took only one standard Nebari ship to destroy the much feared Zelbinion.

Not all Nebari think this kind of existence is a good idea – there is a resistance against the authority who control the Nebari.  This is led by Chiana’s brother Nerri, as Chiana finds out in A Clockwork Nebari.  Although Chiana was desperate to leave Moya and rejoin her brother, who she was separated from after fleeing their home planet years before, Crichton manages to convince her that she is better off where she is, rather than taking the risk off exposing her brother to the enemy.

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